Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, when recreational fishers and coastal communities heard the news that multinational salmon companies had been given the green light in Tasmania to use the antibiotic florfenicol in public waters, they were outraged. After last summer when tonnes of diseased and ranked dead salmon and fat-balls spewed onto people’s beaches, and there were gallons of the antibiotic oxytetracycline travelling around the Huon and Channel from the diseased fish pens that were being treated, people expected change.
The Premier said he was putting the industry on notice and people assumed that meant the government would finally do their job of protecting the marine environment. That would look like fixing their weak regulations that currently allow fish farm companies to destroy wildlife, including dolphins and cormorants and seals and all the rest of the marine diversity in our waterways and bays that have been trashed. That hasn’t happened. Instead, recreational fishers have been told that they shouldn’t fish within 3 kilometres of any lease site that is being treated for at least 21 days after antibiotic feed is tipped into salmon pens.
The problem is there are so many pens across southern Tasmanian waterways and the Huon and Tassal companies have been using antibiotics for so long. Recreational fishers are reasonably asking where in the southern waters will it be safe to fish this summer, and who would know when and where it would be safe because there is no real-time information to tell people where the no‑go fishing zones are. Florfenicol has never been tested for use in Tasmania, but from what the science says, we are shocked that the Liberals are lauding the Chilean salmon industry as best practice for antibiotic use. The truth couldn’t be more different.
The science of florfenicol impacts on the marine environment explains why the Chilean industry has an infamous reputation for being the world’s worst aquaculture practice. Under the heavy hand of big salmon, corruption within the Chilean government is rife, laws have been written to allow cowboy practices and prioritise the maximum profits for companies. The chemical composition of water and sediment around salmon pens in Patagonia is now unrecognisable. What were biodiverse channels are now barrens and the cost for the coastal communities has been extreme. Their way of life has been destroyed. The indigenous Kawésqar in Chile’s south-west now have industrialised waterways and have lost their fishing resources.
The feedlot conditions and warming waters of Chile have caused numerous mass mortality events in recent years. Piscirickettsia salmonis has been responsible for 50-100 per cent of those mortality events. So how does the industry deal with this problem? Not by destocking or reducing the population of salmon to sustainable levels, but by dumping 300 tonnes of florfenicol every year into the fjords and channels of Chile. One researcher studying the use of florfenicol there said it’s badly abused in the production of salmonids. Another said P. salmonis is ‘without doubt becoming increasingly resistant to important frontline antimicrobial classes with severe implications for the future treatment of infectious human and animal diseases.’
To be clear, salmon companies in Tasmania and Chile are not using florfenicol to treat salmonis disease in fish. It is not about giving a sick animal medicine so it can live a long and happy life. It’s about pump-priming the fish to make sure that they can stay alive for long enough to be shipped to the market for maximum profits. The Liberals are setting us up to follow in Chile’s steps, and after what we saw last summer and no change in practices since then, we are deeply concerned at the way they’ve fast tracked the approval of florfenicol in Tasmania.
The risk of antimicrobial resistance is significant globally as an environmental and human threat, and we’re disturbed at the Director of Public Health warning on 7 November when he said:
While there is no evidence of harm to human health from consuming traces of florfenicol, recreational fishers may choose to avoid exposure to antibiotic residues in the fish that they catch and eat.
Communities are very concerned they could be unknowingly exposed to residues of antibiotics not prescribed by a doctor from eating wild-caught fish, especially in the Huon and Channel because they have no idea of whether they’re they can safely fish or not. People want to know whether it is safe to catch fish for the Christmas lunch, and they want real-time disclosure as the Huon Valley Council mayor has suggested.
Time expired.
